DEATH SHIP
Before that rasping voice had ceased to sound, Rab Crane knew how he was about to be murdered. It seared across his brain in a flash even as his muscles sprang into action.
He plunged for the cabin door, tore it open and hurled the watch-like thing in his hand far down the corridor. Before it even hit the floor, it exploded in a blinding flash of atomic force and light!
"God, why didn't I see it before!" exclaimed Rab Crane hoarsely as he wiped his glistening brow. "He had an atomic charge planted in that thing, where he could detonate it by remote control whenever he wanted."
Then he saw that the blinding flash of force had eaten a hole in one inner wall of the corridor but had done no other damage. Excited voices were crying in alarm and heads were sticking out of doors along the corridor.
Stewards and officers came running into the corridor even as Rab Crane drew back into his cabin.
Listening, he heard the officers finish their futile examination and depart, remarking that the atomic bomb must have been planted in the ship earlier. The excited passengers dispersed, reassured that no harm had been done the ship.
Crane found himself shaken a little, despite his steel-hard nerves. The ingenuity of the attempt against his life had been diabolical. Undoubtedly his unknown antagonist was the most deadly he had ever challenged.
Yet Crane's determination to wrest Doctor Alph's stolen brain from the other spy was strengthened rather than weakened. That weirdly living brain was a doom hanging over Earth!
When he dressed for dinner, Crane put his beam-pistol inside his coat, and the feel of it was comforting as he walked into the big, brilliantly lighted dining saloon. Laughing, chatting men and women of several planets, expensively garbed and gowned and jewelled, filled the room. Under the conversation, a Venusian orchestra was softly playing haunting popular melodies.
The steward who led Rab Crane to a table in a corner apologized for its obscure position.
"It's not a very good table, sir, but it was all we had left for last-minute passengers like yourself."
His words made Crane study the others at the table closely as they introduced themselves. The spy who had the stolen brain would be a last-minute passenger, too. He must be at this table!
The four other men at the table were of four different worlds. One was Kin Nilga, a Saturnian rocket engineer, with solemn green face, pale, big eyes and the great-boned body of his race.
Next to him sat Jurk Usk, a Jovian shipping-magnate, squat, huge-shouldered and heavy-browed like all men of Jupiter ' and as surly and sparing of words as most of his compatriots.
The other two were Kark Al, the thin, wisp-like, spectacled little Martian salesman whom Crane had heard complaining about his machinery samples; and Donn Ennimer, the handsome, drunken young Earthman he had noticed when he boarded ship.
* * *
The young Earthman had apparently been imbibing further of the intoxicating blue vibrations at the bar. He was talking with drunken owlishness, to the table at large.
"The service at this table is unspeakable!" Kark Al, the little Martian, told Crane indignantly. "We've been waiting a quarter hour. I'm going to speak to the captain-"
Crane only half listened to their voices. The TSS man was keenly studying the Jovian and Saturnian. He was remembering how the necks of the men in Doctor Alph's house had been broken with one snap.
Only a Jovian or Saturnian had the physical strength to do such a thing! And these two were the only representatives of their worlds in the dining saloon. Was one of them the man with whom Crane was struggling blindly? His heart began to beat a little faster.
"This is my table, isn't it? My name is Lalla Dee," an uncertain, girlish voice said.
It was a Venusian girl who was claiming the last empty chair at the table. She was young and pretty. She wore a white silk dress, and her dark eyes were shining with naive excitement as she looked over the glittering saloon. Crane introduced everyone to her.
"This is my first trip off Venus," Lalla Dee told Crane shyly. "I just won a contest in college — the first prize was a trip to Earth. Isn't it wonderful — people of five different worlds right at this table!"
Crane smiled and said, "Yes, and all of them hungry. It looks as though our steward had forgotten us completely."
"It's an outrage!" declared Kark Al angrily.
"Not gonna wait any longer for steward. I'm hungry," the drunken young Earthman, Ennimer, said owlishly.
And calmly the drunk took one of the exquisite Venusian flame orchids from the center vase, salted it, and began to eat it. Lalla Dee giggled, and Kark Al snorted in disgust.
Crane had not taken his eyes off the Jovian and Saturnian. Jurk Usk sat in the same surly, unmoved silence, but Crane thought that the Saturnian was under tension, that something lurked behind those pale, big-pupiled eyes. Was Kin Nilga his man?
"I was a little afraid to come alone on this trip, but now-" The girl's voice broke off as a scream of awful agony ripped the gay chatter of the saloon and froze everyone into horrified silence.
The scream came from the throat of the drunken young Earthman who had been eating the orchid. The man's lax handsome face was contorted now in agony, his eyes protruding, his body arched half out of his chair, his hands clawing the air.
Another ghastly shriek bubbled from his throat into the frozen silence. Then he crashed down across the table.
Diners sprang to their feet, shouting hoarsely. Stewards and officers came running toward the table. Rab Crane bent swiftly over the young man's body, sniffed at the strange odor that rose from his lips.
Crane straightened, reached for the salt-cellar on the table, sniffed it. His tablemates watched frozenly.
"He's dead — poisoned!" Crane said, finally.
As an officer stooped to lift the body, "Don't touch him with your bare hands!" Crane cried.
For the body of the poisoned man was beginning to glow faintly, his face giving off a feeble, eerie white light!
"Gods of Mars!" cried little Kark Al horrifiedly. "Look at that body — look-"
"This man was poisoned with a super-powerful radium salt," Rab Crane declared to the horrified officers. "He died instantly in awful agony and his whole body is charged with radioactive force now and will have to be handled with lead gloves. Someone substituted the radium salt for the ordinary salt in this salt shaker."
* * *
Lalla Dee looked up at Crane with wide, terrified dark eyes.
"Then maybe it was someone trying to kill you," she said. "The poison couldn't have been intended for any of the rest of us."
Crane knew what she meant. Only Earthmen, out of all the Solar System's peoples, were habitual users of salt. He knew well that the poison had been intended for him — and that someone at this table had made the substitution!
Yet he said, shaking his head, "There's no reason why anyone would want to kill me. I'm just an ordinary importer. No, this young fellow must have had some enemy who took this means to kill him."
"I'll swear that I filled that cellar with ordinary salt today!" said the table-steward hoarsely.
"The whole affair will have to be investigated by the captain," the third mate of the Vulcan said crisply, "meanwhile send for a hospital detail to remove this man's body."
As the body was carried out by leadgloved attendants, Kark Al said sickly:
"I–I guess I'm not hungry after all. I'm going to my cabin."
"I don't want to eat now either," the white-faced Lalla Dee told Rab Crane. "That awful scream-"
In fact, they had all risen from the table except Jurk Usk, the Jovian, who kept his seat and was awaiting his dinner with the surly immobility of his race.
Rab Crane, as he followed the girl toward the door of the noticed that Kin Nilga was already disappearing ahead of them. The Saturnian seemed in a hurry.
Crane's mind was working 'swiftly. Someone at their table had Doctor Alph's brain. And that someone had tried twice, now, to kill him. Of those two things he was certain. But which one? He thought of those snapped necks — the huge physical strength of the Jovian and Saturnian.
He lingered behind Lalla Dee.
"Can you tell me which person at our table came into the dining saloon first tonight?" he asked the shaken table-steward.
"Kin Nilga, the Saturnian gentleman, sir. He was first at the table."
"I want to ask him if he noticed anyone lurking by the table when he entered," Crane said, and went on after the Venusian girl.
But as he moved along the dark promenade deck with Lalla Dee, Crane's excitement was mounting. Kin Nilga, then, had had the best chance of any of them to plant that deadly poison. And Kin Nilga also had the great physical strength that killer must have had.
Was the solemn-faced Saturnian the diabolical agent who had stolen the brain of Doctor Alph? Crane resolved to find out this very night!
Lalla Dee had stopped by the transparent glassite wall of the deck, and Crane saw that she was still shivering.
"That poor young man's face — I'll never forget it!" she said, her dark eyes clouded with horror. "I feel as if there is some horrible monster on this ship, lurking, hidden-"
"Nonsense! Whoever adopted that devilish method of murder was after one man," Crane told her. "And he' be caught within a few hours." And to distract her attention, he pointed through the glassite wall. "There's a sight you'll never see on Venus."
* * *
She looked, and clapped her hands in entranced delight. In the vast black firmament of space burned the eternal stars, glorious blazing jewel in dark space. The ship was rushing through a constellated wilderness of suns. The rocket-tubes had been shut off and only the steady beat-beat-beat of the ventilation pumps came along the dark deck where Crane and the girl stood.
"It's unreal!" Lalla Dee cried. "I've often dreamed what it would be like to see the stars that we can never see through the cloudy skies of Venus, but I didn't dream it was like this."
She pointed to a calm, green speck of light shining large and bright, almost due ahead of the ship.
"That's Earth, isn't it? Is it really as beautiful as everyone says?"
"I'm an Earthman, and my opinion is biased," Crane nodded. "But I think it's the most beautiful world in the System. Its snowy mountains and deep blue seas; its green fields and quiet forests and rivers and old cities — yes, it's beautiful. Beautiful and worth fighting for, worth dying for-"
He had spoken half to himself, his eyes brooding on that calm green speck. He became aware that Lalla Dee was looking at him intently.
"We're always proud of own particular world, aren't we?" he said.
They stared a little longer at the scene, then Lalla Dee turned from the wall.
"I think I'll go to bed," she told him. "I'll see you at breakfast, Mr. Idwall."
"A sweet kid," Crane thought as he left her at her cabin and walked on toward his own. Then the perilous task ahead of him claimed his thoughts. He must search Kin Nilga's cabin.
As he sat in his own dark cabin, waiting for the liner's passengers to retire, Crane's mind grappled with what lay ahead. If Kin Nilga was the possessor of the stolen brain, then entering the Saturnian's cabin was dangerous.
But he had to do it! Every hour that passed brought the Vulcan nearer Earth where Kin Nilga could easily trans-ship to another liner and throw him off the trail. And every hour increased the chance that one of the killer's diabolical attacks would take his life. Crane waited two hours, until silence filled the corridor. The last passengers had sought their cabins and only the ship's officers and men on duty in the control and rocket rooms remained up.
Then quietly the TSS man slipped out of his cabin, his hand resting on the hilt of his beam-pistol.
Except for the droning throb of the air-pumps, there was no sound as Rab Crane approached the door of Kin Nilga's cabin.
He stopped abruptly, stiffened, as he came opposite it. That door was slightly open. And from inside the Saturnian's dark cabin came a hoarse, smothered cry!
Crane shoved the door wide open, pistol aimed. He glimpsed a shadowy figure bending over the bunk, and even as he looked he heard a snap that could be only the dull cracking sound of a breaking neck!
Crane knew, in one swift flash of insight, that he had been wrong. Kin Nilga was not the killer! The real murderer was this squat, shadowy shape who had just slain Kin Nilga!
Crane rasped, "Stand where you are or I'll kill you!"
The shadowy killer turned, started across the dark room toward him with quick, heavy steps"
"Stop or I'll fire!" Crane warned. And when the shadow did not pause, the TSS man pulled the trigger of his beam gun.
The thin white beam from his pistol knifed the darkness of the cabin and struck the shadowy, indistinct form of his opponent squarely.
Yet the killer came on! Though Crane fired his deadly beam again straight into the advancing slayer, the shadow did not even falter as he lunged through the gloom at Crane!